Minus Five // Animated Interview

The following animated interview is the outcome from my studies during my honours year in design research at Monash University.

Minus Five is an animated interview on the experiences children of parental incarceration in Australia. The animation was created as apart of a Communication Design Honours project from a recorded interview with two sisters to help create awareness and gain support for children and families of prisoners. The narration guides the viewer through experiences such as watching a parent being arrested, visits to prison and the importance phone calls have for families.

Design and Animation by Jess Kerss
Music by Jason Oruba

To Find out more visit the project
website by clicking the link.  

CHARACTER DESIGNS

Below features the process of how the characters were designed and the changes that were made to bring more life and personality to each character. 

THE GIRLS

In the post production stages I had planned to create a more detailed, realistic or comic style characters for the animation. However after meeting and interviewing the girls I felt that the above mentioned styles were not only an incorrect fit to their personality but would be to difficult for myself to design and animate given the time frame I had to create the animations. I therefore chose to attempt a simplistic vectorised design for the characters but giving each character slight quirks in their looks to show individuality and personality, such as the older sisters hair colour. 

Although I was happy with the overall look of the girls something seemed to be missing. I felt that they were to flat in design and needed some more life brought to them and the entire sense of the animation. I then began to play with textures and discovered that this was the answer to my problem. By adding the textures this not only gave them more life but was a simplistic and fast way to create details.

In the above images you can see that the girls were created in Adobe Illustrator and then textures were added by using Adobe Photoshop.

THE FAMILY

THE MOTHER CHARACTER

After I had developed a stylistic approach to the character designs of the girls I was able to then create how the mother and father would look. By using the older sisters design as a base I then adjusted the features of the mother to give her a more mature look, however to give the viewers the feeling that the characters were actually a family I decided to make sure the noses were all very similar, maybe slightly longer or wider.

THE FATHER CHARACTER

When designing the character of the father I also used the older sister as a base model however dropping and slightly squaring off his jawline to make him more masculine and thickening the top section of his nose, which I also changed to be a deeper red in colour then the ladies. I wanted the father to seem educated and friendly, as I wanted his personality to denote the importance that people from all backgrounds make mistakes and can go to prison. He is wearing a white t-shirt with close up cotton textures that I photographed and dark green pants, as this is the prison uniform in Melbourne Australia.

OTHER CHARACTERS

THE NOSE PICKER

Other characters were required for sections of the animation. During the Interview the older sister describes how uncomfortable se felt in the visitation rooms of the prison. She mentions that the this room was grimy and therefor I designed aspects of the room such as the floor with a fly, and this elderly man picking his nose. Much like the other characters he is designed to look apart of the same design however not related to the other characters. His nose was designed to be larger to create focus to him picking his nose and also his age spots, hair colour and baldness gives him age and personality. His appearance was also considered to make sure he did not look unhappy or uncomfortable, this giving the viewer the impression that prisons were scary and miserable places.

THE GRUMPY PRISON GUARD

During the interview both sisters mention how the prison guards were intimidating and at times rude. I felt it was necessary to have a guard feature to display this and also reenforce the atmosphere of the prison. The guard was designed to look tough but not to be intimidating as to put off any young viewers watching the movie and create the thought of a scary and intimidating place. The grumpy guards design is aged with a balding head and full beard, however soft eyes and pink cheeks to make him seem more friendly. His facial expressions of squinting eyes and lowering eyebrows followed by his body language of crossed arms portray his frustrated expression.